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In the Spirit of Bret Harte

Trump and his Climate destroying Bro’ Vladimir

No puppet! No puppet! You’re the puppet!

The Washington Post wrote; “The Chinese government said Saturday it will return a U.S. naval drone seized last week in the South China Sea, a step toward defusing maritime tensions between the two Pacific powers. President-elect Donald Trump reacted to the news by telling them he doesn’t want it back. “We should tell China that we don’t want the drone they stole back.- let them keep it!” he tweeted Saturday evening. The comment could prolong one of the most serious incidents between the U.S. and Chinese militaries in recent memory, potentially complicating ties ahead of Trump’s inauguration.”

We wonder why “Terrible Trump” is determind to pick a fight with China? Is it because China is leading the world in Green Technologies and Trump and his business partner Putin are financially “all in” with Oil and Coal?

Interesting essay by Fareed Zakaria in the Post:

Put his campaign rhetoric, tweets and appointments all together, and we’re getting a sense of U.S. foreign policy under Donald Trump. The president-elect has consistently signaled that he wants to be accommodating toward Russia and get tough on China. But that sees the world almost backward. China is, for the most part, comfortable with the U.S.-led international system. Russia is trying to upend it.

It’s ironic that Mitt Romney has been passed over for secretary of state just as his key foreign policy judgment is being vindicated. Romney famously said in 2012 that Russia was the United States’ “No. 1 geopolitical foe.” President Obama mocked the claim, and others — myself included — thought it was an exaggeration. We were wrong; Romney was right.

Obama’s rationale for contradicting Romney was that Russia was a “regional power,” one in economic decline. That made it a nuisance but not a grave global threat. This is an accurate reading of Russia’s position, which has only gotten worse since 2012. The country’s economy has actually shrunk for two years now. The Economist points out that, over the past decade, state spending has risen from 35 percent of gross domestic product to a staggering 70 percent. The ruble has collapsed. The country’s sovereign debt is now rated as junk by Moody’s.

But under President Vladi­mir Putin, Russia has found a way to assert itself geopolitically, despite its economic weakness. It has done so by using effectively what strength it has, such as its still-formidable military and intelligence services as well as its veto in the U.N. Security Council. Most ambitiously and devastatingly, it has found a way to leverage its strength dramatically using cyberwarfare.

We are now gaining a fuller picture of Russia’s use of its power, which began years ago, with operations in Russia itself, then in Georgia, Ukraine, Poland, Germany and other European countries and, finally, in the United States during the last presidential campaign. In each case, Moscow directed a full-spectrum strategy, including hacking, trolling, fake news and counterintelligence aimed at discrediting targeted politicians, interfering with campaigns and tilting elections. These efforts are sometimes used in conjunction with more traditional military force, as in Ukraine and Georgia. Observing Russia’s operations over the past three years, NATO’s former supreme commander, Gen. Philip Breedlove, noted this summer that Moscow’s growing offensive efforts “are of a breadth and complexity that the [European] continent has not seen since the end of World War II.”

China, by contrast, is an economic superpower. While growth has slowed substantially, it is already, by some measures, the world’s largest economy. In 1990, China was less than 2 percent of global GDP; today it is about 15 percent (almost 10 times Russia’s share). It spends $215 billion on its military, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute , about three times Russia’s defense budget. And its foreign reserves total more than $3 trillion, about eight times Russia’s. In a tweet this month, Donald Trump said that he accepted a call from Taiwan’s president because the country buys billions of dollars of goods from the United States. If that’s the metric, note that last year China bought $162 billion of goods and services from the United States, about four times as much as Taiwan.

Many people had assumed that, given this enormous arsenal of strength, China would begin to assert itself geopolitically. And it has done so, especially in Southeast Asia. But China has also become a status quo power, comfortable with the world in which it has grown rich, and wary of overturning the global system into which it is now integrating. So while Trump keeps accusing China of devaluing its currency, for the last year Beijing has been trying to do the opposite. It has been spending tens of billions of dollars to prop up the yuan so that it is seen as a stable and viable international reserve. Whether on climate change or peacekeeping, China has been willing to play a more constructive role in recent years than ever before. It also has far greater capacity to engage in asymmetrical attacks using cyber operations than does Russia. And it makes extensive use of these tactics in military and economic espionage. But it has not, so far, engaged in anything as destabilizing as Russia’s efforts to undermine the Western democratic order.

Keep in mind that China’s view of the world over the past two decades has been fundamentally benign, having grown to wealth and power in that period. Putin, by contrast, believes that the end of Soviet communism in 1989 was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century” and that Russia has been humiliated ever since. His goal appears to be to overturn the U.S.-created international order, even if this means chaos.

The question is, why would an American president-elect help Moscow achieve that goal?

could you anti-Trump wing nuts be any more mis-informed or dumber? Here is just a sample of Jerry Brown’s tricks and what’s gone on during OBAMA’S WATCH!!! Should we make a list of OBAMA’S EPA atrocities? You people are complete morons.

1. Twin Tunnel Plan: Brown is fast-tracking the $54.1 billion Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) that would divert massive quantities of water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to corporate agribusiness, developers and oil companies. The construction of the peripheral tunnels will hasten the extinction of Sacramento River Chinook salmon, Central Valley steelhead, Delta and longfin smelt and green sturgeon, as well as imperil salmon and steelhead populations on the Trinity and Klamath rivers.

2. Senate Bill 4: Not only did Brown sign SB4— Senator Fran Pavley’s “greenlight to fracking” bill—he gutted it at the 11th hour, adding poison pill amendments, which make CEQA review of fracking permits optional, and prevent imposing a moratorium on fracking for 15 months. He signed the bill after receiving at least $2.49 million over several years from oil and natural gas interests. Mark Nechodom, head of the state Conservation Department, recently said definitively, “Gov. Brown supports hydraulic fracturing.”

3. REDD: The REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation+) allows Northern Hemisphere polluters to buy forest carbon offset credits from the global South. Brown is trying to link an agreement among Chiapas, Mexico; Acre, Brazil; and California, to AB32 (which commits to a 25% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions for 2020, and an 80% reduction for 2050).

4. Record Water Exports: The Brown administration authorized the export of record water amounts of water from the Delta in 2011 – 6,520,000 acre-feet, 217,000 acre feet more than the previous record of 6,303,000 acre feet set in 2005 under Schwarzenegger. Most of this went to corporate agribusiness, including mega-growers irrigating unsustainable, selenium-laced land on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley.

5. Record Delta Fish Kills:The Brown administration “salvaged” a record 9 million Sacramento splittail and 2 million salmon, steelhead, striped bass, largemouth bass, threadfin shad, white catfish and sturgeon in the Delta export pumping facilities in 2011. Since the actual number of fish killed in the pumps is at least 5 to 10 times those reported, the actual number of fish killed is probably 55 million to 110 million.

6. Central Valley Project Improvement Act: The act mandated the doubling of Central Valley anadromous fish populations, including Chinook salmon, steelhead, green sturgeon, white sturgeon, striped bass, and American shad, by 2002. Under Brown in recent years, rather than doubling, these fish populations have continued to decline. The Chinook salmon runs on the Sacramento River last year were only 20% of the level mandated by federal law and the endangered Sacramento River winter run Chinook population is threatened with extinction, due to massive water exports out of the Delta.

7. California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA):Brown is trying to weaken or even eliminate CEQA, one of California’s greatest environmental laws, to fast-track big developments for giant corporations like Walmart, Berkshire Hathaway, General Electric, Valero and Chevron.

10. “Theme Park” Wetlands:The Department of Fish and Wildlife under the Jerry Brown administration is letting the Annenberg Foundation bulldoze a section of the Ballona Wetlands to build an interpretive center and help with the “restoration” of the land around the center.

Check out this report by Consumer Watchdog titled “Brown’s Dirty Hands.” The link takes you to where you can download the pdf report or watch the video. The report chronicles how Governor Brown is corrupted by the fossil fuel industry and the utilities. Puts a lie to the oft repeated statement that Governor Brown is an environmentalist.http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/dirtyhands